What Is Domination, and How Can It Be Explained?

Abstract Chapter 1 has three goals. First, it explains what the book means by domination, essentially the intentional political subordination and repression of one or more ethnic communities by a particular community and its elites. Different types of domination regimes are identified and explained, including those based on majorities or minorities, procedural democracies or authoritarian systems, and racist, ethnonational or (pseudo-) civic national appeals. Domination is also contrasted with the other strategies available to elites for governing ethnic diversity. Second, the book proposes a theory for explaining the life cycles of “domination regimes.” It is argued that such regimes come into existence when one community and its leaders are both willing and able to dominate other communities, are maintained for as long as both conditions persist, and end when at least one of the conditions no longer holds. It is argued that the life cycles of domination regimes cannot be explained without considering both their domestic and external contexts, and that dominated communities are unlikely to free themselves by their own efforts, but likely to need the help of others. Third, the book explains its debt to the existing literature on ethnic domination and its cognate concepts, and how it builds on this literature.